Ian McEwan tells Jon Stock about the pleasure of writing a spy novel
with a twist – and why he believes it’s high time John le Carré won the
Booker Prize.

In his closely woven tweed jacket, Ian McEwan looks every inch the Cotswolds country gent as he turns up for our lunch. He has chosen to meet at Barnsley House, a boutique hotel a few miles east of Cirencester, and the small-talk is of how the English countryside has been ruined by arable farming.

“The Cotswolds are now dotted with 200-acre monoculture fields, run by contract farmers who want giant fields so they can turn around their combines,” he says. “It’s not so bad around here. Plutocracies and the army have defended a great deal of our countryside.”

McEwan is not putting this on, hoping to woo Telegraph readers with fighting country talk. Last year the author moved out of London, swapping the terraced housing of Fitzrovia, the setting of his 2005 novel Saturday, for a bucolic corner of Gloucestershire. A keen walker, he cares passionately about the natural landscape, but he also knows that if, as a novelist, he wants to observe those around him, it’s best to blend in. A bit like espionage, the engine room of his latest novel, Sweet Tooth.

McEwan shares many of the skills of a spy. His novels famously require meticulous research, whether it’s Atonement (Dunkirk), Saturday (brain surgery) or Solar (climate change). Only then does he cross over into another world, cover story intact, a quiet authorial confidence his sole protection against being exposed.

Sweet Tooth, his 15th book (which comes out in paperback next week), allows him to explore more fully the many parallels between his own craft and the spy’s. Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) is a female MI5 officer in the early Seventies, charged with encouraging a young writer at Sussex University to write novels of a certain political persuasion. She falls in love with him and must decide between her job and her heart.

“I’d been thinking a lot about the cultural Cold War,” McEwan says, “how the CIA bankrolled organisations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and funded Encounter magazine. The big push was to persuade left-of-centre European intellectuals – ex-communists who knew whereof they spoke – that the West, the US, was the real power of culture. How extraordinary that the world of intelligence could penetrate the world of literature, particularly fiction. It seemed like an open field, a subject that was just waiting to be explored.”

Nothing is straightforward in a McEwan novel, of course, and in a final meta-twist that proves the novelist can be even more duplicitous than an intelligence officer, is he delivering his own verdict: Spy fiction 0, the literary novel 1?

McEwan says he is not bothered that Sweet Tooth might be categorised as genre fiction. For him, such distinctions are irrelevant. It is, after all, his second venture into espionage. The Innocent, published in 1990, was set in West Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War, and did no harm to his reputation as a literary novelist.

“In the end these things just dissolve,” he says. “The only question is how good a novel is, not whether it has spies or detectives or nurses marrying doctors. Take Conrad – we wouldn’t say of him that he’s merely a writer of seafaring yarns. What matters is whether a novelist can devise a particular and plausible world that holds us, and make a moral universe that has such a resonance that we can go back years later and find it still works. Then genre is transcended. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy holds up because it’s a brilliant novel.”

Inevitably, our conversation has turned to David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, the doyen of spy writers whom McEwan thanks in the acknowledgements of Sweet Tooth. During his research for the novel, he met Cornwell for a long lunch.

“Afterwards, I wrote to him and said, ‘either you’ve used this already or you’re about to, but if you’re not…’ and he wrote back saying, ‘absolutely all yours’. He told me that one of the odd things about working for Five or Six was that you never knew how stupid or clever people were. Everyone was charming but you didn’t know if they were any good at what they did. And then they would suddenly disappear and you didn’t know if they had been posted or sacked. That it should be so opaque immediately around you is very appealing to me.”

Le Carré refuses to allow his books to be entered for literary prizes, including the Booker. The reason, some say, is that he has felt rejected by the literary establishment over the years.

“That’s long past,” McEwan says. “I think he has easily burst out of being a genre writer and will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain. He will have charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has. But that’s just been his route into some profound anxiety in the national narrative. Most writers I know think le Carré is no longer a spy writer. He should have won the Booker Prize a long time ago. It’s time he won it and it’s time he accepted it. He’s in the first rank.”

McEwan also names Stella Rimington in the acknowledgements of Sweet Tooth. She was the first female Director General of MI5 and a controversial chair of the Booker judges in 2011, when she focused on “readability”. He read her memoirs, which were “brilliant” on the role of women in MI5, and she features in the book as “Millie Trimingham”. Fellow protagonists of Seventies’ literary life such as Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and Tom Maschler also have fleeting parts.

McEwan himself makes an appearance of sorts, but to say more would spoil the ending, which came to him years ago, before any thoughts of an MI5 plot. “I wrote a message in a notebook saying the pleasure would be to write an end which changes the beginning. And also which implies a story that never can be read.” If Sweet Tooth has a twist, it also has the paciness of a thriller. (Interestingly, it was overlooked by last year’s Booker judges.) Some will read the book at speed, passing over exquisite phrases like “late October brought the annual ritual of putting back the clocks, tightening the lid of darkness over our afternoons”. Such are the perils of a literary writer entering the world of spy fiction. McEwan might not distinguish between genres, but he fears his readers will.

“Because I like narrative pace, there is a danger my reader might go too fast and miss the sentences I’ve toiled over,” he acknowledges. “Of course, there are ways of deflating a narrative that will slow people down. But then they might leave you to go and cook dinner or tweet. The essence is curiosity, which can take many forms. If a novel doesn’t arouse your curiosity on some level, it’s dead in your hands.”

And with that Cotswold man is gone, indistinguishable from the hotel’s locals, just as he likes it, heading back to his country retreat to write about high court judges – the subject of his next book and another world to spy on.

Sweet Tooth (Vintage) is published on May 9. To pre-order a copy for £7.99 plus £1.10 p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk